President Donald Trump is riding into the Republican Party’s midterm convention in Dallas this week as a cowboy, an image that captures a larger political gamble: whether the president can persuade supporters to judge his second term through the heroic persona that helped elect him rather than solely through the experience of his presidency. A metaphor has never been this literal. The Republican Party is selling $16 drink cozies depicting the president on horseback, wearing a white Stetson beneath the word “Dallas” and graphics resembling the old Marlboro cigarette branding.
Trump, meanwhile, has told supporters to approach November’s congressional elections as if his own name were there: “Pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot.” Cowboy Trump to the rescue. Taken together, the cowboy and the instruction suggest a useful way to understand Trump’s increasingly fantastical political imagery. The memes can look like digital kitsch, but they may also serve a practical purpose for a president confronting one of the oldest problems in American politics: incumbency eventually turns a political promise into a measurable record.
This is Trump's bread and butter, a president who has never depended on ordinary political imagery even before entering the White House. His public persona was already partly constructed through television before he entered politics, and his second White House has pushed the technique much further. Over Labor Day weekend, Trump and the White House circulated a burst of memes showing him as a Green Lantern-like superhero building a border wall and factories, a hockey player towering over Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and a commander aboard a warship attacking an enemy fleet.
Earlier images have placed Trump alongside historical figures on horseback, while other posts have cast him in religious or military roles. What has changed is the job those images have to do. A candidate can ask voters to imagine what he will accomplish.
An incumbent eventually has to compete with what voters think he actually accomplished. Trump enters this midterm season with a record attached to him: prices, tariffs, manufacturing, foreign conflicts and the other results of nearly two years back in office. The gap between Trump’s fantastical online persona and the pressures facing his administration has become especially pronounced as the midterms approach.
That gives the superhero, the commander, and now the cowboy, a political function beyond ordinary branding. Each returns Trump to a form hard to measure against an economic statistic or a grocery bill: the strongman who builds! So Trump the character once existed mainly as a promise about what a Trump presidency could be and now exists alongside an actual Trump presidency.
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